Showing posts with label Leacock. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Leacock. Show all posts

18 December 2023

The Globe's Best Books of 1923: 'Canadian Authors Can Be Read With Pleasure, Profit and Pride'


The Globe, 10 December 1923

Three men feature on the first page of the 1923 'Recent Books and the Outlook,' the 'Globe 100' of its day. The first, Paul A.W. Wallace, is recognized for his debut, Baptiste Larocque: Legends of French Canada. The second man, W.J. Healy, wrote Women of Red River, which was "arranged and published under the Women's Canadian Club of Winnipeg by Russell, Land, and Company." Norris Hodgins, the third, was recognized for Why Don't You Get Married.

All three are Canadian and all three are new to me.

I've been following the Globe's century-old lists of best books for nearly a decade now, and so think I know what to expect. There will be a dour pronouncement – in this case, "there is a dearth of outstanding books, especially novels, at the present time" – which will, in turn, be counterbalanced by something of a positive nature:

Under the 'More Canadiana' banner are books by Americans LeRoy Jeffers, Charles Towne, John M. Clarke, Charles W. Stokes, Paul Leland Haworth, and Briton Wilfred Grenfell. The final ingredient in this messy mix is George King's self-published Hockey Year Book. Its inclusion marks the first ever mention of the sport in 'Recent Books and the Outlook.'

I can't imagine how much it would fetch today. 84 Victoria Street itself is worth a bloody fortune.

Despite the flag waving, Canadian writers don't fair all that well in the Globe's 1923 list, accounting for just 46 of the 196 titles featured. As in 1922, poets dominate: 

Ballads and Lyrics - Bliss Carman
Selected Poems - W.H. Davies*
Morning in the West - Katherine Hale
Flint and Feather - E. Pauline Johnson
The Complete Poems of Archibald Lampman
Shepard's Purse - Florence Randal Livesay 
 The Miracle Songs of Jesus - Wilson MacDonald
The Complete Poems of Tom MacInnes
The Songs of Israfel and Other Poems - Marion Osborne
The Garden of the Sun - A.E.S. Smythe
The Empire Builders - Robert Stead
Woman - Albert Durrant Watson

That's twelve titles! From a nation of nine million! The Globe informs that the rest of the world produced just five collections of note!

For the second year running, we have the inclusion of The Complete Poems of Archibald Lampman, of which there is no record. And so, for the second year, I'll suggest that what is being referred to is The Poems of Archibald Lampman, first published in 1900 by George N. Morang. As Ryan Porter notes, the collection enjoyed several reprints. Still, I see no evidence of a new edition in 1923, never mind 1922. I'll say the same of E. Pauline Johnson's 1912 Flint and Feather. There was a new edition of Robert Stead's The Empire Builders, which just happens to be the only poetry title I own.


Curiously, Wilson MacDonald's The Song of Prairie Land is singled out for mention in the introduction to the poetry list, yet only his The Miracle Songs of Jesus makes the cut.

Our non-fiction writers fare the worst with just four of the fifty titles listed. I don't have a copy of even one, though I am interested in the Marjorie Pickthall, "a memorial volume edited by Helena Coleman," which does not seem to exist.  

Our writers of fiction don't fare much better, contributing just eight titles to the list: 

The Gaspards of Pine Croft - Ralph Connor
Lantern Marsh - Beaumont S. Cornell
Why Don't You Get Married? - Norris Hodgins
The Happy Isles - Basil King
When Christmas Crossed the Peace - Nellie L. McClung
Emily of New Moon - L.M. Montgomery
The Viking Heart - Laura Goodman Salverson
Spirit of Iron - Harwood Steele

There were twenty-one Canadian works of fiction on the 1922 list.

Here are some that made it:

And here are some that did not:

Frank L. Packard's The Four Stragglers is at the bottom of the pile, Stephen Leacock's Over the Footlights is at the top. Between the two is Winnifred Eaton's "Cattle" – or is it Cattle? – which may just be the best Canadian novel of 1923. 

The Gaspards of Pine Croft, which I've not read, is one of my $2 Connors.  

I've long been on the lookout for Beaumont S. Cornell's lone novel Lantern Marsh because it's set in a thinly disguised Brockville, Ontario, which is where I do my weekly grocery shopping.  

Basil King's novel The Happy Isles is praised as the best since his 1909 breakthrough The Inner Shrine. I do like it, but nowhere near as much as The Empty Sack (1921).

I was once engaged to a woman who knew a woman who had been engaged to Harwood Steele. 

And so it goes.

* Correction: Roger Allen writes, "Are you sure the dozen poets are Canadian? The W.H. Davies nearly everyone thinks of - still in print - is the author of The Autobiography of a Super-Tramp. He only became a poet because he lost a leg jumping on a train in Canada and had to go back to Britain, but that doesn't make him Canadian."

He's correct, of course. I can't explain the error, though it might have something to do with a bottle of Canadian Club sent by an aunt as an early Christmas gift. 

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24 July 2023

Average Leacock for the Average Man



Winnowed Wisdom
Stephen Leacock
New York: Dodd, Mead, 1926
300 pages

The author's sixteenth book of humour in as many years, one wonders how he managed; it's not as if Professor Leacock had no day job.

Winnowed Wisdom came in mid-career with the best of his writing in the past. Look no further than the six-page italicized preface for evidence:

It is the especial aim of this book to make an appeal to the average man. To do this the better, I have made a study of the census of the United States and of the census of Canada, in order to find who and what the average man is.
     In point of residence, it seems only logical to suppose that the average man lives at the centre of population, in other words, in the United States he lives at Honkville, Indiana, and in Canada at Red Hat, Saskatchewan. 
     In the matter of height the average man is five feet eight inches, decimal four one seven, and in avoirdupois weight he represents 139 pounds, two ounces, and three pennyweights. Eight-tenths of his head is covered with hair, and his whiskers, if spread over his face... 
 

You get the idea. Still, this made me laugh:

The percentage of women in the population being much greater in the eastern part of the country, the average woman lives one hundred and five miles east of the average man. But she is getting nearer to him every day. Oh yes, she is after him, all right!

The thing with Leacock is that even his most middling work has something that catches the light and shines. The same might be said of the collections themselves; Winnowed Wisdom may be weak, but three of its essays – 'How We Kept Mother's Day,' 'The Laundry Problem,' and 'How My Wife and I Built Our Home for $4.90' – were included in Laugh With Leacock: An Anthology of the Best Work of Stephen Leacock (1930).

Deservedly so.

This early passage from 'The Laundry Problem' had me sold:

In the old days any woman deserted and abandoned in the world took in washing. When all else failed there was at least that. Any woman who wanted to show her independent spirit and force of character threatened to take in washing. It was the last resort of a noble mind. In many of the great works of fiction the heroine's mother almost took in washing.
This comes later:
In the old days if you had a complaint to make to the washerwoman you said it to her straight out. She was there. And she heard the complaint and sneaked away with tears in her eyes to her humble home where she read the Bible and drank gin.
J.B. Priestley looked at Winnowed Wisdom and selected 'Our Summer Convention' and 'At the Ladies Culture Club' for 1957's The Bodley Head Leacock (aka The Best of Leacock).

I wouldn't have chosen either. 

My Winnowed Wisdom favourites have never featured in a Leacock anthology, so I thought I'd share. Each is as relevant today as a century ago.

The first, 'The Outline of Evolution,' is the second of Prof Leacock's 'The Outlines of Everything' essays.

It begins:
It seems that recently there has been a lot of new trouble about the theory of evolution in the schools. Either the theory is being taught all wrong or else there is something the matter with it. For years it had seemed as if the doctrine of Evolution was so universally accepted as to lose all its charm. It was running as a close second to Spherical Trigonometry and Comparative Religion and there was no more excitement about it than there is over Anthropology.
     Then suddenly something seems to have happened. A boy in a Kansas public school threw down his book and said that the next time he was called a protozoon he’d quit the class. A parent in Ostaboola, Oklahoma, wrote to the local school board to say that for anyone to teach his children that they were descended from monkeys cast a doubt upon himself which he found intolerable.
I never experienced such a fuss, but then I attended school in Montreal.

Sounds smug, I know. Given what's going on in the republic to the south, I can't help it.

My second favourite essay is titled 'Are We Fascinated with Crime?'

I've never been much fascinated myself, though I once made a good living writing true crime books published under a nom de plume. This was a decade ago. The books were sold around the English-speaking world – French and Polish translations appeared in other spheres – and I got a fair cut.

There's been talk about the rising interest in true crime, but I don't buy it. The fascination pre-dates London's Police Gazette. Montreal had Police Journal, and, in my day, Photo Police and Allo Police

Allo Police, 16 September 1984
As a younger man, I watched 48 HoursUnsolved Mysteries, America's Most Wanted, and...

Mea culpa.

I was fascinated with crime. We are all fascinated with crime. In 1926, Leacock recognized as much, all the while questioning our interest: 
If a rich man is killed by his chauffeur in Tampa, Florida, and his body hidden in the gasoline tank, why should you and I worry? We don’t live in Tampa and we have no chauffeur and gasoline is too expensive for us to waste like that.
     Yet a whole continent will have to sit up and read a column of news about such a simple little event as that.
I read the professor's article as BBC and New York Times reports on the arrest of the Long Island Killer vied for my attention. 

The Montreal Gazette, 7 December 1957
Busby? Preistley? You tell me who chose better. Winnowed Wisdom can be read online here courtesy of the fine folks at the Faded Page.

Whatever you decide, I guarantee the average man will something that amuses, as will the average woman.

Object: One of the many Leacocks purchased up over the years at the McGill Book Fair. I'm fairly certain this one, a first American edition, was picked up in the early 'nineties. Price: $2.  

Access: First published by Macmillan (Canada), Dodd, Mead (United States) and John Lane (United Kingdom). The Macmillan and Lane editions feature the same dust jacket illustration by John Hassall.


The cover of the Dodd, Mead edition is by Jazz Age illustrator John Held, Jr.

In 1971, Winnowed Wisdom was added as #74 to the New Canadian Library. It holds the distinction of being the first NCL title without an introduction. It survived long enough to benefit from the third series design.


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26 December 2022

The Very Best Reads of 2022: Ladies First


Late last night, as Christmas festivities drew to a close, I pulled Victor Lauriston's The Twenty-first Burr (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1922) from the shelves. It seemed appropriate way to end the holiday. One hundred years earlier, my copy was presented by the author to a woman named Olive Shanks.


I enjoyed the first four of its twenty-eight chapters, but know I won't be finishing the novel before year's end, meaning it's time for the annual Dusty Bookcase recap of best reads, books to be revived, etc.

This was a year unlike any other in Dusty Bookcase history. For the first time, women wrote a majority of the titles; twelve of the twenty-two reviewed here and in the pages of Canadian Notes and Queries.

Sara Jeannette Duncan's A Daughter of To-day and Joanna E. Wood's The Untempered Wind stand well above the other twenty. Both are available in Tecumseh's Early Canadian Women Writers Series, which goes some way in explaining how it is that only male authors feature in my annual selection of the three books most deserving of a return to print:

Philistia

Grant Allen
London: Chatto & Windus,
   1901

It was publisher Andrew Chatto who encouraged Allen to try his hand at fiction. This debut novel, first published in 1884, furthers the author's writing on philosophy,  naturalism, religion, and socialism. Ironically, its ending was spoiled by Chatto's intrusion. 

Whispering City

Horace Brown
Pickering, ON: Global
   Publishing, 1947

A noir thriller set in Quebec City, Whispering City pre-dates Hitchcock's I Confess by five years. Both have their weaknesses. Brown's adaptation of the former – likely the first novelization of a Canadian feature film – improves upon its source material.


Stephen Leacock
Toronto: S.B. Gundy, 1915

Leacock's legacy suffered a blow this year when McGill announced that the building named in his honour, would be renamed after a venture capitalist who had pledged $13 million to the the university.

It's the stuff of a Leacock story.


As series editor of Véhicule Press's Ricochet imprint, I was involved in reviving Arthur Mayse's 1949 debut novel Perilous Passage. 'Telling the Story,' the introduction provided by the author's daughter, Susan Mayse, is one of my favourite in the series. Reprinted in Canadian Notes & Queries, it can be read through this link.

Recognition this year goes to England's Handheld Press for its reissue of Marjorie Grant's 1921 novel Latchkey Ladies.


I knew nothing of Marjorie Grant or Latchkey Ladies before reading this March 22 review in The Times

Finally, sadly, I report that the New Year's resolutions made last December didn't go far:

  • I resolved to focus more on francophone writers, yet read just one: Philippe-Joseph Aubert de Gaspé (and then only in translation).
  • I resolved to feature more non-fiction, and yet this writer of non-fiction reviewed nothing but fiction.
  • I resolved to keep kicking against the pricks. This was easily done. Witnessing the  miscreants of the Freedom Convoy roll past on its way to Ottawa gave extra incentive.
This December I make no resolutions.

Here's to the New Year!

Bonne année!



10 April 2022

Ten Poems for National Poetry Month, Number 4: 'You' by Ram Spudd Stephen Leacock


For the month, the fourth of ten poems
find interesting, amusing, and/or infuriating.

Verse from Ram Spudd, "one of nature's gentlemen," as celebrated in Stephen Leacock's Moonbeams from the Larger Lunacy (Toronto: Gundy, 1915).

YOU

                                          You!
With your warm, full, rich, red, ripe lips,
And your beautifully manicured finger-tips!
                                          You!
With your heaving, panting, rapidly expanding and contracting chest,
Lying against my perfectly ordinary shirt-front and dinner-jacket vest.
                                 It is too much
                                 Your touch
                                 As such.
                                 It and
                                 Your hand,
                           Can you not understand?
Last night an ostrich feather from your fragrant hair
                                Unnoticed fell.
                                I guard it
                                Well.
                                Yestere’en
                           From your tiara I have slid,
                               Unseen,
                               A single diamond,
                               And I keep it
                               Hid.
Last night you left inside the vestibule upon the sill
                               A quarter dollar,
                               And I have it
                               Still.


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02 March 2022

Lunar Attractions; or, The Leacock I Like



Moonbeams from the Larger Lunacy
Stephen Leacock
Toronto: Gundy, 1915
282 pages

My introduction to Stephen Leacock came through a copy of Laugh With Leacock belonging to my father. A squat mass market paperback, it sat on peach crate shelving in our basement. As a child, I was drawn to its cartoon cover.

 No pun intended.

Montreal: Pocket Books, 1946
First published by Dodd, Mead in 1930
The scene depicted comes from "The Hallucination of Mr. Butt," which in turn comes from "Afternoon Adventures in My Club," which first appeared in book form in Moonbeams from the Larger Lunacy, which I read for the first time last week.

Made me laugh.

"The Hallucination of Mr. Butt" is one of seven tales the narrator tells of fellow club members. Butt (his first name is never disclosed) sees himself as a most generous and self-sacrificing person, ever ready to assist others. In the episode covered, he's setting out to help the Everleigh Joneses:
“Isn’t it rather late to go there?” I protested.
     “My dear fellow,” said Mr. Butt warmly, “I don’t mind that a bit. The way I look at it is, here are these two young people, only married a few weeks, just moving into their new house, everything probably upside down, no one there but themselves, no one to cheer them up,”—he was wriggling into his raincoat as he spoke and working himself into a frenzy of benevolence,—“good gracious, I only learned at dinner time that they had come to town, or I’d have been out there days ago,—days ago-”
The night is cold, and rainy, and dark, but after knocking on several doors – "‘Do you know where the Everleigh Joneses live?’ They didn’t. ‘All right,’ I said, ‘go back to bed. Don’t bother to come down.’" – Butt succeeds in finding the newlyweds' house. At the club the next day, Butt shares what followed:
"Hullo," I called out; "it’s Butt." "I’m awfully sorry," he said, "we’ve gone to bed." "My dear boy," I called back, "don’t apologize at all. Throw me down the key and I’ll wait while you dress. I don’t mind a bit."
     "Just think of it," continued Mr. Butt, “those two poor souls going to bed at half past ten, through sheer dullness! By George, I was glad I’d come." ‘Now then,’ I said to myself, ‘let’s cheer them up a little, let’s make things a little brighter here.’"
Butt visits the Everleigh Joneses on a near-daily basis, rolling up his sleeves to help them settle in – "got the pictures up first—they’d been trying to put them up by themselves in the morning. I had to take down every one of them—not a single one right." Ultimately dissatisfied, he has them move to a downtown flat – "I like an apartment far better than a house" – when tragedy strikes:
“'He’s ill—some sort of fever—poor chap— been ill three days, and they never told me or sent for me—just like their grit—meant to fight it out alone. I’m going out there at once.” From day to day I had reports from Mr. Butt of the progress of Jones’s illness. “I sit with him every day,” he said. “Poor chap,—he was very bad yesterday for a while, —mind wandered—quite delirious—I could hear him from the next room—seemed to think some one was hunting him—‘Is that damn old fool gone,’ I heard him say. “I went in and soothed him. ‘There is no one here, my dear boy,’ I said, ‘no one, only Butt.’ He turned over and groaned.
That's not the end of Everleigh Jones, nor is it the conclusion of the story. Much as I like "The Hallucination of Mr. Butt," it is far from the best in Moonbeams from the Larger Lunacy; it isn't even the best of "Afternoon Adventures in My Club." That distinction belongs to "The Spiritual Outlook of Mr. Doomer," whose titular character is first depicted looking gloomily out the club library's windows. He is a man saddened by, as he puts it, "the sense of the irrevocability of death and the changes that must come after it.” “You think of these things a great deal, Mr. Doomer?” the narrator asks.
“I do,” he answered. “It may be that it is something in my temperament, I suppose one would call it a sort of spiritual mindedness. But I think of it all constantly. Often as I stand here beside the window and see these cars go by”— he indicated a passing street car —“I cannot but realise that the time will come when I am no longer a managing director and wonder whether they will keep on trying to hold the dividend down by improving the rolling stock or will declare profits to inflate the securities. These mysteries beyond the grave fascinate me, sir. Death is a mysterious thing.”
"The Hallucination of Mr. Butt" is the only story from Moonbeams from the Larger Lunacy to feature in Laugh With Leacock, which according to the back cover of my father's copy is "the cream of Stephen Leacock's humor [sic]." It is also the only story to make it into The Leacock Roundabout, Laugh With Leacock's successor.  

New York: Dodd, Mead, 1956
What I've coming to realise is that my taste in Leacock is markedly different than those of the anthologists. As the covers of Laugh With Leacock and The Leacock Roundabout suggest, the stories contained provide good-natured laughs; black humour has no place.

I've worked as an anthologist myself, so understand the constraints, one of which is length. Moonbeams from the Larger Lunacy begins with "Spoof."


At twenty-four pages, it's by far the longest piece. It appealed to me not only for the passages of Spoof Leacock provides, but as a satire of publisher marketing:
This novel represents the last word in up-to-date fiction. It is well known that the modern novel has got far beyond the point of mere story-telling. The childish attempt to interest the reader has long since been abandoned by all the best writers. They refuse to do it. The modern novel must convey a message, or else it must paint a picture, or remove a veil, or open a new chapter in human psychology. Otherwise it is no good. SPOOF does all of these things. The reader rises from its perusal perplexed, troubled, and yet so filled with information that rising itself is a difficulty.
Moonbeams from the Larger Lunacy was a gathering of fairly recent magazine pieces and previously unpublished work intended to capitalise on the Christmas market. And, because it was the 1915 offering, the Great War intrudes for the first time: "The War Mania of Mr Jinks and Mr Blinks," "Last Man Out of Europe," "Sidelights on the Supermen," and "In the Good Time After the War." The last, which also happened to be the final piece in the collection, imagines the post-war as a time of great cooperation, in which political differences are non-existent. It is the weakest piece, while "Last Man Out of Europe," ranks amongst the very best. Here, Parkins, yet another member of the gentleman's club tells of the days of horror he and travelling companion Loo Jones suffered in trying to leave the continent. In Hungary when war was declared, the pair made for the nearest railway station:
“They said they’d sell us tickets. But they questioned us mighty closely; asked where we wanted to go to, what class we meant to travel by, how much luggage we had to register and so on.”
They reach Genoa only to find that it is three days until the next steamer to New York:
"Stuck it out as best we could: stayed right there in the hotel. Poor Jones was pretty well collapsed! Couldn't do anything but sleep, and eat, and sit in the piazza of the hotel."
Cutting, but not dark; it stands in such contrast with Leacock's later writing about the Great War. In our own darkening days, I recommend "The Boy Who Came Back" from The Hohenzollerns in America (Toronto: Gundy, 1919). 

An unfocussed post, I know, but then this book, like so many Leacocks is a bit of a grab bag. "Our Literary Bureau" made me laugh out loud; "Weejee the Pet Dog" is, I hope, the worst thing I'll read by the man.

My point is that there is so much more to Leacock than Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town and anthology servings. Seek out the long out-of-print volumes. As with any writer, the most popular isn't necessarily the best.

Object: A nicely-proportioned hardcover, very typical of its time. My first Canadian edition was purchased three decades ago at the annual McGill Book Fair (held in Redpath Hall, mere metres away from the university's Leacock Building). Price: $1.00. At the end of the volume is found three pages of advertisements for the author's other books: Arcadian Adventures with the Idle Rich, Behind the Beyond, Nonsense Novels, Literary Lapses, and Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town. These are followed by an advert for The International Studio magazine.

Sadly, but unsurprisingly – it was published in 1915, after all – my copy lacks its dust jacket (above).

Should I have expected more for a dollar?

It once belonged to a G.R. England. Going through the 949 Englands in the 1921 census, I find Gordon England (age 19), Gaspard England (age 21), George England (age 51). Gosselin England (age 71)... and that's just Quebec.

Access: Moonbeams from the Larger Lunacy enjoyed several Canadian, British, and American editions before going out of print in the 'twenties. It returned in 1964 as #46 in the New Canadian Library, and remained in print well into the 'eighties. I once purchased a copy with the third series design at Eaton's in downtown Montreal, not 100 meters from the university at which Leacock taught.

Used copies of are both plentiful and inexpensive. If you've got the cash, the one to buy is offered at US$150 by a Milton, Ontario bookseller. It has the dust jacket.

21 December 2020

Best Books of 1920: Beware the Bolshevik Poets


The Globe, 4 December 1920
The 1920 Globe round-up of the year's best books was published on the first Saturday of that December. Twenty-four months had passed since the Armistice, and the introduction takes pains to position the conflict in the past:


This bold pronouncement follows:

The war has passed into history and even the "aftermath" is over.
   
Sure, but a good many titles concerning the Great War feature, and a new category makes its debut:


No, the conflict is still very much felt. Loss and sacrifice continue to inspire poetry, such as Our Absent Hero by Mrs Durie, the widow of Capt William Arthur Peel Durie.


Captain Durie died at Passchendaele on 29 December 1917 in an effort rescue wounded comrades in No Man's Land. 

Capt William Arthur Peel Durie
1881 - 1917
RIP

Another of the newspaper's poetry selections, J. Lewis Mulligan's The Beckoning Skyline and Other Poems (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1920), includes fifteen pieces of verse inspired by the war.

The 1920 Globe list recognizes a total of seven Canadian books of poetry, the others being:
               Acanthus and Wild Grape - F.O. Call
               Leaves on the Wind - Rev D.A. Casey
               Apple Blossoms - Carrie Wetmore McColl
               Lady Latour - Rev W.I. Morse
               Rhymes of a Northland - Hugh L. Warren
This is something of a return to form. Where in 1918, the paper gave notice to eight Canadian volumes of verse, the 1919 list featured all of two (one of which, Pauline Johnson's Flint and Feather, had been published seven years earlier).

As is so often the case in the paper's annual book list, the "Poetry" section brings columns of comment, much if it designed to distance we Canadians from our American cousins:
We usually write in metre and dislike poetical as well as other kinds of Bolshevism. It is merely the affectation of free verse that makes American 'poetry' more distinctive – or notorious – than Canadian. It is a cheap substitute for originality.
   There has been a great deal more verse published this year than appears in the publishers' lists. Nearly all of it has been printed at the authors' expense, and it has been circulated largely 'among friends.' This practice is not to be despised or discouraged, unless it raises false hopes in authors who have merely the faculty of rhyming without possessing poetical talent or literary judgement.
There are 264 titles in the 1920 Globe list, fifty-three of which are Canadian. Just six of the fifty-three – all novels, no poetry – feature in my library:


Going by the Globe, 1920 was as good year for the country's novelists and short story writers; twenty of the 114 fiction titles are Canadian:
          Aleta Dey - Francis M Beynon
          The La Chance Mine Mystery - S. Carleton
          Glen of the High North - H.A. Cody
          Sheila and Others - Winifred Cotter
          The Conquering Hero - Murray Gibbon
          Eyes of the Law - Ethel Penman Hope
          Daisy Herself - Will E. Ingersoll
          The Luck of the Mounted - Sgt Ralph Kendall
          The Thread of Flame - Basil King
          A Son of Courage - Archie P. McKishale
          Graydon of the Windermere - Evan McKowan
          Every Man for Himself - Hopkins Moorhouse
          The Forging of the Pikes - Anson North
          No Defence - Gilbert Parker
          Poor Man's Rock - Bertrand W. Sinclair
          Dennison Grant - Robert Stead
          The Prairie Mother - Arthur Stringer
          The Rapids - Alan Sullivan
          The Viking Blood - Frederick William Wallace
          Stronger Than His Sea - Robert Watson
For the first time, the newspaper lumps together Canadian fiction, though it errs in failing to recognize Basil King, Prince Edward Island's second bestselling author, as a fellow countryman. The Thread of Flame, Rev King's sixteenth novel, is listed with This Side of Paradise under the heading "By Other Authors."


I've read all of two of the twenty. The Thread of Flame ranks as my favourite King novel after The Empty Sack. The other, Hopkins Moorhouse's Every Man for Himself didn't make so much of an impression. I found it even less interesting than described: 


Of the remaining novels, The Prairie Mother was reprinted for a decade or so. In 1972, Alan Sullivan's The Rapids enjoyed a brief second life with the University of Toronto Press. It can' be argued that the most enduring Canadian novel of 1920 is Aleta Dey, which was revived in 1988 as a Virago Modern Classic. It remains in print to this day in a Broadview Press edition.


This country fares much worse in other categories. Where in 1919, Canadian authors took six of the coveted "Economics" titles, the 1920 showing amounts to A Study of Canadian Immigration by Prof W.G. Smith and Occupations for Trained Women in Canada by Mrs Vincent Massey. If forced to choose, I guess I'd read the latter. It might be interesting to see what advice Mrs Massey, daughter of Sir George Robert Parkin, wife of one of Canada's most privileged men — a future Governor General, no less — might have for the working woman.

The Canadian titles in the "Historical" category are a touch more tempting:
Hydro-Electric Development in Ontario - E.B. Biggar
The Cross-Bearers of the Sanguenay - Very Rev W.R. Harris
The Evolution of the Oil Industry - Victor Ross
The Life and Times of Sir Alexander Tilloch Galt - O. D. Skelton
The Life and Work of Sir William Van Horne - W. Vaughan
A new edition of Katherine Hale's biography of Father Lacombe and a revised edition of George H. Locke's When Canada was New France. also feature, but the real standout is George T. Denison's Recollections of a Police Magistrate, which is deemed "our outstanding Canadian book of the year."

This is something new; the Globe had never before made such a pronouncement. Here's its description:

I haven't yet cracked open Recollections of a Police Magistrate — copies begin at $245 — but it can be read for free here thanks to the Internet Archive,

I prefer paper, myself.

Consider me old fashioned.

Tempted as I am to leave it there, this being 2020, I can't help but note that the 1920 Globe list — like those of 1918 and 1919 — features not so much a passing reference to the Spanish Flu.

Not one mention,

Not one book.



21 December 2019

The Globe 100 One Hundred Years Ago: Poets are Struck Dumb and Capitalism Proves Embarrassing


The Globe, 6 December 1919

Last month, the Globe & Mail published 'The Globe 100', its annual list of the year's best books.

Why the hurry?

One hundred years ago, the best books were announced in December. The number of 1919 titles ‐ 247 in total ‐ hints at a particularly healthy harvest, though there's not much in the way of celebration. The list's introduction recognizes the "serious aspect" of then-recent titles being added to bookshelves: "One might have expected after the anguish of the war a reaction towards the amusing and frivolous, but in war's wake comes the necessity of reconstruction." So many new books deal with "the world-wide feeling of unrest":
The obligation, cheerfully assumed, of providing for the welfare of half a million returned soldiers has forced upon people an interest in every angle of the labor which many of them never felt before. This has been accentuated by a series of embarrassing strikes, and also the labor conferences in Ottawa and in Washington.
Must say, "embarrassing" is not the adjective I would've used.

The Winnipeg Tribune
9 June 1919
I'll add that novels like Bertrand W. Sinclair's entertaining and troubling The Hidden Places (Toronto: Ryerson, 1922) lead me to question whether the obligation of providing for the welfare of returned soldiers was "cheerfully assumed."

As if labour troubles weren't bad enough, the Armistice has had a devastating effect on Canadian verse.


"The coming of peace did not bring such a chorus as might have been expected," notes the Globe. "Peace came on the poets so suddenly that it struck them dumb." In this, no country suffered a greater silence than Canada. It dominated the list of best poetry books in 1918 Globe – eight of thirteen titles – but in 1919 is reduced to just two volumes: Canadian Singers and Their Songs, an anthology compiled by Edward S. Caswell; and Flint and Feather, the complete poems of the late Pauline Johnson.



It gets worse. Flint and Feather was first published in 1912.

The fiction list isn't nearly so affected. Its 104 titles is dominated by foreigners Robert W. Chambers, John Galsworthy, Joseph Hocking, Anthony Hope, Peter B. Kyne, Compton McKenzie, Kathleen Norris, Sax Rohmer, Sheila Kaye-Smith, Booth Tarkington, and Francis Brett Young, but within we find sixteen novels by Canadian authors:
The Touch of Abner - H.A. Cody
Sky Pilot in No Man's Land - Ralph Connor
The Heart of Cherry McBain - Douglas Durkin
On the Swan River - Hulbert Footner
The Substitute Millionaire - Hulbert Footner
Bulldog Carney - W.A. Fraser
In Orchard Glen - Marian Keith
Mist of Morning - Isabel Ecclestone Mackay
Janet of Kootenay - Evah McKowan
Rainbow Valley - L.M. Montgomery
Polly Masson - William H. Moore
The Lady of the Crossing - Frederick Niven
Joan at Halfway - Grace McLeod Rogers
Sister Woman - J.S. Sime
Burned Bridges- Bertrand W. Sinclair
The Man Who Couldn't Sleep - Arthur Stringer
The Girl of O.K. Valley - Robert Watson
I've long been on the hunt for Stringer's The Man Who Couldn't Sleep. The brief description provided by the Globe encourages a doubling of my efforts:


I'll also be on the lookout for Polly Masson by William H. Moore, a novel described as "propaganda of a praise-worthy kind... designed to bring about a better state of feeling between English and French-speaking Canadians."

Future Governor General John Buchan's Mr. Standfast appears twice.

Guess they really liked it.

Should I have counted Mr. Standfast as a Canadian book? As it stands, the country claims just fifteen percent of the fiction titles. On the other hand, Canada dominates in "Economic" (a category that doesn't feature in previous Globe lists):
On Labor problems Canadians have made valuable contributions, "Labor and Humanity" by Hon. Mackenzie King has reached its fourth edition and has been made a textbook at Harvard University. Prof. MacIver of the University of Toronto, Prof. Leacock of McGill and Dr. Lavell, formerly of Queen's appear prominently his year among those who have helped to create a better understanding of labor and reconstruction.
Industry and Humanity, the Right Honourable Mackenzie King's newest book, is the first in a list of fifteen. Other titles by Canadians include:
Production and Taxation in Canada - W.C. Good
The Canadian Commonwealth - Agnes C. Laut
The Unsolved Riddle of Social Justice - Stephen Leacock
Labor in the Changing World - R.M. MacIver
Bridging the Chasm - Percival F. Morley
I wondered about The Canadian Commonwealth and The Unsolved Riddle of Social Justice. Turns out that I don't own either. I do have copies of The Heart of Cherry McBainBurned BridgesIn Orchard GlenBulldog Carney, and Sky Pilot in No Man's Land.


Chances are I'll read them before Production and Taxation in Canada. 


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